


Once Upon A Tide

by Omnicat



Series: Plankton [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Hidden Layer That Does Not Change Canon Events, Bedtime Stories, Domestic Bliss, F/M, Family, Family Man Bucky Barnes, Fluff, Hunting for food, Interspecies Relationships, M/M, Merpeople, Multi, Poly Parents, Polyamory, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Story within a Story, Threesome - F/M/M, Trauma Recovery, Vacations, crabs, standard Winter Soldier trauma umbrella
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-03-17 21:54:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3545141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away, there lived a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman...”</p><p>aka the one where Bucky Barnes is a shapeshifting merman, and his children are deeply unimpressed with the lack of imagination that goes into their bedtime stories. The alternative is... unfortunate, though.</p><p>
  <b>(Part of a continuity, but can stand alone!)</b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Once Upon A Tide...

"Once upon a time," Bucky started –

"This better be good," Eleanor whispered to her sister. Given that said sister was in the other bed, with two nightstands and Bucky in between them, it was a bit of a sorry excuse for a whisper.

Bucky raised a pointed eyebrow.

Pearl ducked under the covers until only her eyes, a mop of thick blonde curls, and the sound of her giggles remained, while Eleanor crossed her little arms over her chest and looked back at her father defiantly.

"Something wrong with my bedtime stories, Lenore?"

"They’re always the same. The knight defeats the dragon and the princess defeats the giant, and they live happily ever after. Bo-ring."

"What, you want the dragon to eat the knight and the prince and princess to live _un_ happily ever after?"

Eleanor reared upright just so she could fall back onto her pillow with a dramatically despairing sigh. "You’re missing the point! No more dragons, no more giants, pleeeeaaase."

Bucky hmph-ed. "Fine. No dragons or giants."

"Tell us a story about the Hydra," Pearl stage-whispered, her chin now tucked over the edge of her blanket.

Bucky did his best not to frown. "Those aren’t very nice stories, sweetheart. I got a really good one about a giant tonight. Way better than usual."

"Tell us about the Hydra!" Eleanor repeated. "Hydra, hydra, hydra!"

"Hydra, hydra, hydra!" Pearl chanted along.

_Geeze,_ Bucky thought, thrown a bit. He’d had a theme in mind for tonight. A moral, realistic combat tactics, the whole kit and caboodle. Size isn’t everything, and all that. No way he could make that work without a giant.

Now he’d have to come up with something on the fly.

"Hydra, hydra, hydra!"

"Alright, alright, you little monsters. I’ll tell you about the Hydra. And the Leviathan too, how about that? Two for the price of one."

"Yay!" they cheered, and settled down triumphantly.

Bucky sighed, then cleared his throat. "Once upon a time..."

 

Once upon a time, there was a fisherman, a fisherwoman, and a merman. They were just young men and women, and they’d never seen real evil in their lives. The first boy was small and sickly, and the girl was never allowed to do anything exciting because she was a girl, and the second boy had a secret he wasn’t allowed to tell. But they were happy, and they were together, and mostly life was good.

But their country, the Kingdom of the Phoenix, was at war with its neighbour, the Kingdom of the Hydra. One day, the Hydra army came to the village where the fisherman and the fisherwoman and the merman –

( _You, Mom and Pop again?_

_Yeah, yeah, you got me._ )

The Hydra army came to Steve, Peggy and Bucky’s village and burned it to the ground. The townspeople fled, and the three friends were separated. A lot of people were hurt or killed in the attack, and when the three couldn’t find each other again afterwards, they assumed the others were among the ones who had died.

Steve had lost his parents along with his two best friends, and he wandered out into the wilderness, mourning and sick and all alone. He tried to find out where the Hydra army had gone so he could take revenge, but his body was too weak. He got lost and would surely have died if he hadn’t crossed paths with a kindly old wizard. The wizard asked what brought the boy so far from any villages, and Steve told him all about the Hydra army’s evil deeds and how he wanted to stop them before they could do to anyone else what they’d done to him.

The wizard was impressed by Steve’s bravery and worked a spell on him that cured his sickness and made him big and fast and strong. Stronger than anyone else in all the lands, except for one – the king of the Hydras. The wizard gave Steve a magical shield too, and he told him to use his powers for good and save the kingdom from the Hydras, because he was the only one strong enough. Steve was only too happy to obey.

Meanwhile Peggy had gathered all the survivors she could find and led them to safety in a nearby village. She told the smiths to make swords and the carpenters to make bows, and she taught everyone how to use them and how to fight, so that the next time the Hydra army came, the villagers would be able to defend themselves.

Some people said she wasn’t allowed to what she did because she was a girl, and because they had all seen her cry for the loss of her friends and _wrongfully_ thought that was a sign of weakness. One of them even challenged her to a duel, claiming that he was the rightful leader because he was a man. Peggy accepted his challenge and defeated the man easily. Then everyone saw she was the best and smartest of them all, and they made her their leader. She made the village as strong and safe as she could and then sent messengers to the Phoenix king’s castle to tell him what the Hydra army was up to and ask the Phoenix army for help.

A magical queen who lived between the stars saw how much Peggy had accomplished and decided to give her the same long life and great strength the old wizard had given Steve. Because she was impressed by Peggy’s dedication to her people, even when they treated her unfairly, and also because the queen knew something important about the future that Peggy didn’t.

One of the messengers found Steve after he’d saved another village from the Hydra army, and he returned to Peggy. They were so happy to be reunited, they married the very same day.

...and then there was Bucky. He wasn’t dead either, but the Hydra army had chopped off his arm and thrown him into the sea, where the mighty sea monster Leviathan captured him and let him believe his friends and family and everyone else he loved was gone. So he kinda wished he _was_ dead.

Turns out the big secret Bucky had to keep was that he was a merman. His mother was a mermaid and his father a human man, so he could live both on land and in the water if he wanted. This was very useful to the Leviathan, who saw what the Hydra army was doing and wanted their power for itself. He wanted Bucky to give him that power, but Bucky refused. He fought the Leviathan and escaped.

Leviathan cursed him for it; instead of changing between his human and his merman forms as he pleased, the Leviathan made it so that he could only breathe the air like a human if he spilled the blood of a human every sunrise, and to go back to living in the sea, he first had to drown in it.

Bucky ran as far and as fast as he could, but he – he – when the sun came up...

Anyway, the Leviathan sent a bunch of pirates after Bucky, and they found him and dragged him back, and the Leviathan put a second curse on him. From then on, Bucky couldn’t escape anymore, so he was forced to do whatever the Leviathan wanted.

( _Two curses? That’s not fair!_

_Of course not. He’s the bad guy, he doesn’t care about playing fair._ )

While Bucky was being, uh, bullied by the Leviathan, Steve and Peggy joined up with the Phoenix army to fight the Hydras. Together, they could take on a hundred soldiers at once. The Hydra army didn’t stand a chance. At his wit’s end, the Hydra king called upon the Leviathan for help, and the Leviathan sent him Bucky. Bucky wore black armour with a helmet that hid his face, so when Peggy and Steve met him on the battlefield, they didn’t realise it was him. Bucky did recognize them, but because of the curse, he had no choice but to attack them.

Again and again the three friends fought each other, but even Steve’s shield and Peggy’s cunning combined was no match for the power given to Bucky by Leviathan’s black magic. After every battle Bucky would beg and cry on his knees for the Hydra king not to make him hurt his friends again, but the Hydra king would only drown him in the sea and send him back to the Leviathan for punishment.

( _I don’t like this story._

_Well, I did warn you it wouldn’t be a nice one, sweetie._

_Don’t you know any better ones?_

_Not about the Hydra._

_Then tell us about something else._

_Alright. How about... pirates?_ )

Pirates raided the village where the merman, the fisherman and the fisherwoman lived. They took the merman away and made him their slave, while his friends thought he was dead. Steve and Peggy rebuilt the village and taught the villagers how to defend themselves. When the pirates saw how strong the village had become, they decided never to return there. So the village had peace, and Steve and Peggy became the leaders and got married, but it didn’t bring their friend back, and they never stopped missing him.

Then one day, Peggy and Steve took their fishing boat and went sailing. They met a shoal of dolphins, which they followed all day because they were so cheerful and talkative. The sky was clear and the winds were perfect. They were on their way to the fishing grounds when the dolphins told them about a merman friend of theirs, who they thought could use some friends like them...

 

Bucky sank down on the bedroom trunk and stared at the wall as, no longer held at bay by the distraction of effort, horror rose like a tidal wave.

"I think I just scarred our kids for life," he announced to the room at large.

Steve stuck his head around the bathroom door with a quizzical frown and a mouth full of foam, and Peggy turned in her vanity chair, where she was setting her curling pins for the night.

"I told them a bedtime story about how the ‘sea monster’ Leviathan and its buddy Hydra kidnapped me, brainwashed me, quasi-murdered me over and over, and forced me to kill innocent people every time they woke me up."

Peggy and Steve exchanged a look.

"That’s a new low, I must admit," Peggy said, as Steve’s head disappeared back into the bathroom to spit out the tooth paste.

"Pfft, that’s all you’ve got to say?"

"Children are tough," she said flippantly. "They’ll be fine."

"They probably won’t even realise you were talking about yourself for years," Steve added more consolingly, and turned off the bathroom light.

Bucky dragged a hand down his face. "I basically opened with ‘your mom, your pop and your dad walked into a Hydra raid...’"

"Oh," Steve said.

"Oh," Peggy said.

There, finally, was the appropriate level of awkward his actions required from a reaction.

"Well, the other point still stands," Steve declared in his most commander-y voice. "They’ll be fine, you’ll see. We’ll talk to them about it in the morning."

 

They didn’t make it to morning; Pearl woke up crying around four. Bucky, having woken in a cold sweat of his own not ten minutes earlier, rushed out of bed and closed their door before Steve or Peggy heard it too.

_Good job, soldier, that took you exactly one night,_ he thought. _Isn’t it nice to know you still haven’t lost your touch of terror after all these years?_

But, to his utter astonishment – no. This hadn’t been his doing at all.

"C-crabs," Pearl sobbed. "The size of trash cans! They really exist. My teacher talked about it in school!"

Bucky stared, slack-jawed and pathetically relieved.

"You know what?" he said eventually, rubbing his daughter’s back. "I bet those things taste _great_."

Pearl gaped at him.

"How about we ask Grandma about it this Sunday, huh? She knows merfolk from all around the world, there’s no way she doesn’t know someone who’s tried it."

Half an hour later, Pearl had dozed off curled up into her father’s side. Bucky let his own mind drift in the warm and the dark, focussed on the soothing sound of her breathing.

"Daddy?" Eleanor asked quietly.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"How did the Hydra story end?"

"Well," he whispered, calmer now. "Eventually, while Bucky was fighting Peggy and Steve, they knocked his helmet off, and after fifteen years they finally realised Hydra hadn’t killed him. They saw how he cried over being made to hurt them, and then the most extraordinary thing happened."

"What?"

"After all that time, and after everything he’d done, Steve and Peggy still loved Bucky. And the power of their love was so strong it broke the curse."

"Oooooh," Eleanore sighed, clearly pleased. "Wait, which curse? There were two."

"The one that made him obey Leviathan."

"And the other one? You can’t keep being cursed!" she hissed.

Bucky’s nose stung. He rubbed at it, and his mouth twisted in what he choose to classify as a smile.

"Peggy and Steve took Bucky home, where he belonged, and waiting for them there were the star queen and her husband, the thunder king, who had travelled through time to help them. Hydra and the Leviathan were very powerful, but their healers undid all the black magic they could, until there was only his great strength and long life and one little dark thing left. Every sunrise, Steve or Peggy had to prick their finger with a needle, and Bucky had to kiss it better. Peggy and Steve were both very brave and very strong, and they loved Bucky very much, so they said yes, we’ll do that. And so they lived happily ever after."

 

When he finally emerged from the girls’ room, Peggy was waiting for him, sleepy-faced and wrapped in her evening gown.

"You told it wrong," she murmured.

"Oh?"

"It wasn’t the power of our love that broke the curse, it was the power of _yours_."

Bucky groaned. "Peg, come on, at _this_ hour?"

"Every hour of every day, if that’s what it takes, James," she said with a seriousness belied by her drooping eyes and her head lolling against the wall. "I may have married twice, but I intend to divorce never. Now come back to bed. It’s not warm enough without you."

He let her take his hand and put him in the middle of the bed, her arm around his waist.

"I just talked myself into a corner, that’s all," Bucky whispered after a while. "I was making shit up on the fly, said I recognized you from the start. That’s all."

"Shush."

Steve groaned, tried to pull Bucky into him only to get a crotch full of his knees, and settled for groping for his hand instead.

"Kidzokay?" he slurred.

"Yeah. The school teacher’s the real culprit."

"We’ll catch’em."

"Go to sleep, Steve."

Steve _hmmm-_ ed goodnight, and Peggy _hmmm_ -ed goodnight, and Bucky dutifully _hmmm_ -ed back.

_I love you too,_ he thought, smiling into the dark. _I love you too_ , and slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're called coconut crabs. NO DON'T GOOGLE THAT.
> 
> (Just kidding, I wouldn't have told you if I didn't sadistically wanted you to Google it. Try the Japanese spider crab too, while you're at it!)


	2. 10 Years Later

"Mom, what’s for dinner?" Bucky heard, distantly, beyond the sound of the entire ocean in his ears.

"I don’t know, you’ll have to ask your dad."

"Dad, what’s for dinner?"

"Your other dad, honey."

"Where is he?"

"Over there."

"Right. Has he moved from that spot at all today?"

"Go ahead and bring him a towel, he’s been lazy enough for one day."

Bucky lifted his fins to wave at them, but made no move to get up out of the water or open his eyes. Moments later, footsteps came splashing in his direction.

"Dad?"

"Hm?"

"Dinner?"

"Is it done already?"

"Ha ha. Please feed me before mom and pop try to cook and give us all food poisoning."

"I heard that!" Steve shouted from back on the beach.

"You should really learn to whisper, sweetheart," Bucky said, and opened his eyes. She – like her little sister – had been compensating for the superhuman senses they’d inherited from Steve all their lives, though. And sure enough...

"Nah," Eleanor said, and shouted back over her shoulder: "You were supposed to!"

Laughing, Bucky submerged fully one last time, sat up, stretched, and made for the beach. "For that, I’ll roast you a chicken just the way you like."

"Hey! I heard that!" Steve hollered.

"Good!"

"Stop turning my children against me, you jerk!"

"It’s not stealing if you _gave them to me!_ " Bucky singsonged.

Eleanor threw a beach towel at his head. "I like Mom better than both of you."

Peggy whooped.

" _Combined._ "

"Awww," Bucky and Steve said in tandem.

But Bucky dragged himself the rest of the way out of the water with a smile, and dried his hair feeling supremely content, the mellow, early-evening sunlight slanting down on him. He had to give Howard one thing: he may not have the sense god gave him, or enough discretion for Bucky to trust him with a secret his children had known since they were four years old, or any discernable pattern to which of his inventions would work and which would blow off another limb, but if he offered you something money could buy, he delivered only the best.

"Go spend your vacation time on my private beach on a tropical island," he’d told Peggy and Steve – and he’d sent them straight to paradise. He’d also offered chef and maid service to go with it, so Bucky would have these weeks off from his ‘job’ too, but _that_ , they’d declined. The complete solitude of the villa was far more valuable.

Once dry enough for the change, Bucky wrapped the towel around his waist, waited for his tail to turn into legs, and went up the beach to the house. Peggy, who was playing cards with Steve on the porch, whistled at him when he passed, the towel held in place with his right hand. He grinned and put a little extra swing in his step. He got a pair of pants and a shirt from the bedroom and peeled the waterproof sleeve from his left arm. Sighing blissfully, he flexed his hand and elbow. The mechanics didn’t get stiff from being confined in inflexible rubber all day, but there was enough artificial and phantom sensation in his arm to make him feel like they did anyway.

Back in the kitchen, Eleanor was already busily collecting ingredients to prepare the chicken.

"Where’s your sister?" Bucky asked.

Eleanor shrugged. "Close, I guess. There shouldn’t be more than ten minutes of air left in her tank by now."

Bucky frowned. "You left her to go diving alone?"

"No, I just came back early. She said there was something she wanted to do without me."

"When?"

"Dunno, an hour ago?"

Bucky turned on his heel and marched outside.

"We don’t drown that easily, dad!" Eleanor called after him defensively. "We’re not amateurs!"

"Honey," Bucky said to Peggy. "Can you see Pearl?"

He meant, obviously, ‘please dislodge your mind from its proper place in the time-space-probability continuum for a moment and use the precognition-like portion of your powers, courtesy of the side-effects of temporal-dimensional travel on your puny mortal form, to tell me our youngest hasn’t died while we weren’t looking’. Instead, she cocked her head to the side and pointed behind him.

Bucky whirled around. There was Pearl, coming toward them across the beach with her flippers in one hand and... a fishing net in the other?

"What the hell?" Steve said.

When she saw she had their attention, Pearl waved and jogged the rest of the way, grinning hugely. "Dad, look what I found!"

Eleanor appeared in the doorway, and Steve at Bucky’s shoulder. Pearl bounded up the porch steps and dropped the net at Bucky’s feet.

"Oh, gross!" Eleanor yelped, backing away. "Pearl, you didn’t!"

"Is that – ?" Steve asked with a note of alarm.

Pearl beamed. "Dinner!"

"Oh, god," Peggy half-groaned, half-laughed.

Bucky stared, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, from his daughter to the massive crab she’d brought home. Then, slowly, he knelt and untangled the net. "Did you..."

"Caught and killed it with my bare hands," Pearl said proudly. "Like a real merman’s daughter. And they aren’t nearly as scary as my teacher made them out to be way back when, so I conquered my fear too. Two birds with one stone!"

And Bucky was thrown back in time to a time when killing things seemed like the most natural thing in the world – _all_ the way back, to sweet, cold water, fitting in his mother’s lap, little sisters flashing through the water alongside him, a mouth-wateringly delicious fish he knew in the dark and by its sound and smell but would forget the human name of for years on end because once upon a time some memories just didn’t _matter_.

Back when children like himself were still an option, Bucky had _dreamt_ of moments like this.

He shot his daughter a dazzling grin which she returned tenfold, and then looked over his shoulder at Steve and Peggy, smiling helplessly. "Do you see what you did? _You_ gave that kid to me. You even named her after me."

"You can’t prove that," they chorused, an old refrain.

"Pearl is a very popular name," Steve said.

"On both sides of the pond," Peggy added.

"Does this mean we’re not having chicken?" Eleanor asked, eyeing Pearl’s catch with no small amount of dejection and trepidation.

"You’re not going to serve that raw, are you?" Peggy asked.

"Well, if you people insist on disrespecting my culture, you’re not getting any. More for me and Pearl!" Bucky said cheerfully, and scooped up the crab. "Holy cow, what a beast. It’s a good thing you’re so strong, or I worry what it would’ve done to you."

"I killed it real quick, I promise. I didn’t want it to, you know..."

"That’s good, sweetheart. That’s real good. Where did you find this thing, anyway?"

"Oh, I had to swim around for _ages!_ "

Pearl followed him into the kitchen and helped him prepare her catch, chattering animatedly all the while.

 

("Did you tell dad coconut crabs are _land_ animals?" Eleanor teased later that evening, while they were doing the dishes. There was no bite in it, though; after lots of procrastination, she’d taken one bite and practically inhaled her portion.

"Shut up," Pearl said. "So am I. It fits.")

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Peggy's precognitive abilities due to timetravel - like the star queen and thunder king in the previous chapter - are references to things I haven't written yet, and which might never get written in a way that matches up with this fic; that's what it's an AU of an AU for. :P Suffice it to say that time travel dimension hopping was involved courtesy of the future Jane and Thor of an alternate universe. Or something like that, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments on older fics will ALWAYS remain welcome.


End file.
